GFi Comments by juv3nal

It should be noted that this is a specialized offshoot of speedrunning that aims to minimize the number of presses of the A button rather than being concerned with time per se because the setup to the run takes something like 12 (maybe 25?) hours. It’s pretty nutty.

Dogmeat is the best because he is basically non judgmental (“You’re not the same man who went into that vault 200 years ago” Et tu, Codsworth?) and you can make him wear googles. DOGGLES! Game of the year, folks.

There was a fair amount of pushback from some other academics I follow on twitter saying stuff along the lines of “Not to invalidate this individual’s experience, but this is not the case in my department etc.”

In November 2013, I appeared on Charlie Brooker’s documentary How Video Games Changed the World. We’d been putting Zac through a number of tests and meetings with pediatricians, trying to work out if his array of behavoural difficulties aligned with autism
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I think when I went on that programme, it was at a sort of pivotal moment. I knew Zac better, I understood him a little. He was telling us more. Minecraft seemed to have given him both a vocabulary and the confidence to use it. So when the documentary producer asked me about that game, I just gushed; I talked about how it was being used in schools to help teach kids everything from physics to architecture, but most of all I talked about how it created a safe and creative space for a lot of children who may struggle to find safe and creative spaces elsewhere. “I’d love to shake the hand of the guy who designed that game,” I said. I think the emotion behind that sentiment was palpable on screen. And then they stopped filming, and I suppose I was crying a little bit.
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Markus Persson had one chance to change my son’s life and he took it. He didn’t know it, but that’s what he did. He will always be a goddam hero to me.

Honestly, IMO it’s so pretty that I’d be happy if all there was to do was zoom around and look at stuff. I mean I hope there’s more to it, but that’d just be gravy so long as I’m not unduly impeded from zooming around and looking at stuff by a bunch of brutally tough hostile aliens or whatevs.

it’s obscured in tumblr’s UI, but I have it from several sources that she got doxxed right in the very comments/responses to that very post and within less than hour too so speculation was they had something ready to go which is terrifying

Oh also, the editor’s note at the top of that cracked piece is pretty great:

It’s apparently a big deal in some circles, so we followed the links and read the piles of data presented, and had to stop and take a deep breath just to grasp it all. “Gentlemen,” we said amid the stunned silence, “do you realize that if what they’re saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?”

Oops forgot to mention, they are playable in-browser, but you may need to click in the game area for arrow keys (the only controls in the ones I looked at) to work. Bears Bears Bears is rather er incomprehensible opaque, so don’t flee if you bounce off that. Tarantella Sicilienne unpacks a narrative in the scene titles in the upper left, as an example of something more approachable.

Take … the fact that the primary ludic goals of the MMO are to kill stuff to get loot, in order to kill bigger and meaner stuff. I dont mean to argue that I’m opposed to combat systems in games or even necessarily metrics and reward systems, rather that in a lot of cases these design choices are modeled—consciously or unconsciously—on ingrained capitalistic tendencies.
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The contradiction here is that games which promise more agency tend to actually offer less, pandering to the player in exchange for the dedicated grind. But play in many of these cases can feel truer because the games spend less time telling the player what to do and patting them on the head for it and more time giving the player the means to figure it out for themselves. That being said, it makes sense that the logics reproducing mechanisms of capital are more familiar to people than ones that don’t. I can understand why leisure can be maligned as “time-wasting” when the virtue of constant productivity permeates our society. I can understand why it might not even get recognized as play. Because joy, happiness itself, can be a radical act. Because sometimes a 20-plus hour videogame has less “play” packed into it than idly clicking on a tool just to listen to the sound it makes.

I can hardly believe I made a post about that, but I do think it’s interesting in that whether it’s going on about about brotastic shooters or arty indie games or something in between, the games site/blog news cycle rarely touches on a segment of the market which is clearly capable of shifting a ton of money.

I’ve never taken the phrase ‘walking simulator’ to be derogatory, as claimed, but I guess that makes sense that it is.
I mean it is and it isn’t depending on who’s using it, I think. There’s certainly been some indie developers who are into reclaiming it and wearing it as a badge of pride etc.

It’s just a cynical cash grab is all. You just know if non pre-orders of game sell at all they’re going to more than happy to ding you for another $10-$15 for the “exclusive” mission as DLC after some contractually agreed delay.

I’ve not played most of the ones mentioned in that article because the titles they’re talking about are basically everything leading up to SCUMM engine and I feel probably “before my time”(?). I did play Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, & Grim Fandango. I was a Sierra (which in hindsight, aside from the rpg trappings of the quest for glory series are probably objectively worse) kid growing up so I didn’t get around to Monkey Island and MI2 “as they came out,” but managed to find my way to them before they got the up-rez/rerelease treatment.

I never got around to Zack McKraken or Maniac mansion although I do remember fiddling around with them on display computers in the store.

The Labyrinth movie game, Loom and The Dig I’ve never touched at all.

The Eidolon and Koronis Rift I’d never heard of, though I do vaguely remember seeing ads or magazine articles for Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus.

1) Vancouver represent!
2) Man those guys are so young.
3) If y’all have not checked it out and are into a free metroidvania game, An Untitled Story (windows DL) by Thorson is pretty great. A brief description from his site (which doesn’t really support linking directly to info about a particular game):

In An Untitled Story, you begin as an egg in your nest, and the rest is up to you to figure out. Fight 18 unique bosses, traverse a huge game world, and unravel a mysterious storyline. There are 5 different difficulty options for players of varying skill levels. Also included is a multiplayer capture-the-flag-style Heist mode. Hook up a USB gamepad before starting!

We’ve never invented a story before. All of our games have been based on existing stories. This is a new one and a new experience for us.
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We really need (Leigh & Ste’s) sanity and experience because as designers we easily follow paths that lead far away from things that people understand and enjoy when playing a game. Basically to keep it from becoming too much of an “opaque artsy fiasco”, something we have been criticized for in the past

Our lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a five o’clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her.
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It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.

While it doesn’t make what they’ve chosen to do any less gross, part of me feels like they would have caught less flack for it if they had led their reveals with a bunch of single player story stuff. That, at least, would’ve given some context to their “Everybody is playing as Arnaud” rationale. As it stands, all they’ve shown is the coop, basically. I mean I get it that the coop is the thing that’s “new” with this iteration, so they have to lean on it, but still.

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